I thought that Nico Muhly’s first album Speaks Vol­umes was a lovely, if pos­si­bly too intel­lec­tual, album. Gor­geously com­posed, there were parts of it that felt like they were going right over my head. This can hap­pen a lot in this age of “con­tem­po­rary clas­si­cal” music com­ing from labels such Type, Mias­mah, and Bed­room Com­mu­nity. Indeed, Bed­room Com­mu­nity has a his­tory of releas­ing par­tic­u­larly off-kilter jux­ta­po­si­tions of sound. I’ve writ­ten at length about the Val­geir Sig­urðs­son and Ben Frost albums, two titan­i­cally impres­sive bolts of cre­ativ­ity. Muhly’s sec­ond album, Moth­er­tongue appears to be the third part of that album tril­ogy to me, a strong state­ment for this fairly new record label. And the rea­son why I feel this way is that Muhly has injected a beau­ti­ful rough warmth to this com­plex new album. Hinted at in the title, this is an album about voice and how it can be used as an instru­ment, but not in a Medulla type of way. The cut-up, repeat­ing, lay­ered voices here are used as an instru­ment along with strings, keys, elec­tron­ics, per­cus­sion, not instead of them. The syn­ergy is remark­able. The open­ing 4 part “Moth­er­tongue” fea­tures Abi­gail Fis­cher, a clas­si­cal mezzo-soprano, hav­ing her voice uti­lized like few other singers of her back­ground. The repeated phrases serve as move­ments and motifs through­out the piece, twist­ing, turn­ing, and behav­ing like a vio­lin or trom­bone would. Helgi Hrafn Jóns­son sings and plays trom­bone on the next suite of music to a haunt­ing effect. The ele­gant and antique struc­ture of this suite is sim­ply beau­ti­ful, full of frag­ile piano and for­mal harpischord. How­ever, the true mas­ter­piece of this album is with­out a doubt the final suite, “The Only Tune,” fea­tur­ing label-mate Sami­don con­tribut­ing voice, banjo & gui­tar to Nico Muhly’s bed of elec­tronic and sym­phonic noise con­struc­tions. There is a won­der­ful murk­i­ness to this set of music which con­jures, to me, a lone man on the porch of a run-down shack, sur­round­ing by the sounds of a swamp alive with wildlife, lament­ing the tale of two sis­ters and their tragic fate. It’s eerie, dev­as­tat­ing, and lingers with you long after it fades into silence. The use of feed­back Muhly employs here is an inter­est­ing device com­ing from a clas­si­cal com­poser of his pedi­gree. The dif­fer­ent ele­ments teeter and brush up against each other to cre­ate majes­tic ten­sion for the entire dura­tion of it’s epic 3 parts. A highly rec­om­mended and astound­ingly cre­ative sopho­more album. Go to this page for more infor­ma­tion about buy­ing options includ­ing dig­i­tal + phys­i­cal bun­dle deals. You can very eas­ily pre­view the entire album at this link. Check it out!